Monday, May 6, 2013

Good Gorean Combat Video On Youtube

The God of Beer, aka BradAtWar "Superman"Guardian has posted a few battle videos that give a pretty good idea how Gorean combat works, like this one here. It's basically Brad carrying a camera during a mass raid on the Agarath Vikings and camming around on various people as he fights. Or doesn't fight, you can't really do an effective job of fighting in an SL Gor Evolved if you are doing anything else at all. Brad gets downed twice, and I've been in fights with Brad, he's a legit super bow, and mostly it's other people who get downed when he fights. I think he was basically just doing the filming in this fight.

Experienced Gorean fighters will be able to easily figure this out, but I'll point out a few things for those who are not experienced fighters.

You'll note a lot of large pointed stake-like objects growing out of the ground. Those are tree trunks. They look like stakes because Brad has his alpha channels turned off, and the foliage on trees is normally rendered in the alpha channels. I know this for sure because when Brad is downed, no red bubble (also rendered in alpha channels) pops up around him.

Some Second life viewers, like Firestorm, allow you to place your camera so that it views another avatar in the same sim you are in with a mouseclick. That's what Brad is doing when the camera suddenly jumps to a different scene in the battle. He's watching others fight, basically.

Interesting bit at the end. There are various people lying on the ground bound in ropes. Brad takes one as a captive, leashing her up. (You do that by clicking on the ropes and then clicking on the popup menu that says "leash." You can then drag the person in the binds wherever you like.) And so Brad starts dragging his captive off to the docks, probably with a view to roleplaying with her for a time and thus encouraging the Agarath Vikings to raid his lands to rescue her.

But as he's leaving, he gets sniped by a defender, arrows hitting him from the fort. So Brad drops his captive since you can't run while dragging a leashed captive (in fact, you CAN run with a leashed captive in the game, but it's against the rules of battle on most sims). Once he's free of the captive, he starts shooting it out with the sniper, which typically would not go well for the sniper, but an Agarath Viking, unknown to Brad, makes a run out to where Brad is and sneaks up on him and downs him with a sword while he's engaged with the sniper. Excellent tactics.

Brad's former captor then proceeds to bind him, but she does not take him captive, when the video ends she is clearly headed away from the fort, which generally means she is going to sail him, the fate of most invaders who are losers in a battle. Generally just one or two are kept captive to be roleplayed, though sometimes virtually a whole group will be taken. It's up to the victors how many get roleplayed, and since that means committing an hour at least to interacting with the captives, there's a tendency for most to get sailed.

An important part of many Gor Evolved is missing here. Most Gor Evolved groups use Vent when they raid. It makes things a lot more exciting, hearing your friends voices as they shout on Vent, "Over here! I'm downed! My captor is in the red, you can take him down easy!" or "We got snipers in the tower to the southeast" or "Ok, lets stick together here at the gate and wear them down before we go in."

Finally, I do not believe this video is at all typical of Brad's performance in battle when he's not filming. He generally gets into the thick of the fighting and stays there. The filming made him hang back a lot, so in that sense it's not typical of Gor Evolved battles. Mostly you want to be in there, shooting and stabbing. But it still gives you some idea what goes on in a battle, and that's a good thing!